Washoe County Board of Commissioners heard an updated proposed budget plan for Fiscal Year 2026 on Tuesday.
Several items still need to worked out in the proposed budget, the county's chief financial officer told board members, including moving eight positions from ARPA funding – which is set to expire – to the General Fund. She said that the $1.2 million cost to do so will be more than offset with the $6 million generated by interest on APRA funds.
She also recommended that the Washoe County Library receive $1.3 million in general fund support to be budgeted centrally and added to the residual expansion fund balance of approximately $3.5 million. These funds would be used as needed based upon a vote of Library Board of Trustees.
“This Board has been clear that we don’t want to see layoffs,” Chair Alexis Hill said. “We want to see how department can find efficiencies and cost-savings and return money to the General Fund.”
“I think we’ve made so much progress as a County, and I don’t think that any department wants to see that progress diminished,” Chair Hill said. “We’ve increased Library hours, we’ve increased sheriff’s deputies, we’ve supported our most vulnerable people at the Cares Campus and prevented deaths on the street. I think that we’ve done incredible work, and we don’t want to go backward, but this is an opportunity to tighten and see what we need the next fiscal and make some hard decisions or potentially find some new revenues.”
From this point, a public hearing and adoption is set to be heard on May 20th, and then it will be filed with the Nevada Department of Taxation.
(Washoe County contributed to this report.)
